...a photoBook is an autonomous art form, comparable with a piece of sculpture, a play or a film. The photographs lose their own photographic character as things 'in themselves' and become parts, translated into printing ink, of a dramatic event called a book...
- Dutch photography critic Ralph Prins

zaterdag 10 september 2016

Pornografie.

Germany: Anabas-Verlag Gunter Kampf, 1971. First Edition. Quarto. Full-page black and white images of destruction, police brutality, and images from Vietnam. One of the great antiwar and anti-violence artists' books of the era. (Parr / Badger, v2, 150-151).

The only work he could get was cleaning the morbidly obese. It was hard work but it was better than nothing. All day he lifted folds, swabbed sweaty crevices and lanced various pustules. The people were generally nice and thankful. One day as he worked on a particularly tough leg boil a woman farted right in his face. “Lady, why do have to make my job gross?”

Everything is relative. Anything can be made glorious or gross depending on your perspective. Klaus Staeck zooms right in in his 1971 book PORNOGRAFIE shortening the viewers depth of ﬁeld. As a lawyer who passed the German Bar in 1969 Herr Staek was well acquainted with the distorting power of the magnifying lens. He uses this power with blunt force in an attempt to revitalize images and objects which in many cases, even though they contain obvious brutality, have become mundane.